On the turn of the
century a library without books was unimaginable. Now it seems almost certain.
Like so many other traditional institutions of intellectual and cultural
life—publishing, journalism, and the university, to name a few—the library
finds itself on a sheer drop at the dawn of a digital era. What are libraries
for, if not storing and circulating books? With their hearts cut out, how can
they survive?
The current years of
austerity have not been kind to the public library. 2012 marked the third
consecutive year in which more than 40 percent of states decreased funding for
libraries. In 2009, Pennsylvania, the keystone of the old Carnegie library
system, came within 15 Senate votes of closing the Free Library of
Philadelphia. In the United Kingdom, a much more severe austerity program
shuttered 200 public libraries in 2012 alone.
It is not
the first era to turn its back on libraries. The Roman Empire boasted an
informal system of public libraries, stretching from Spain to the Middle East,
which declined and disappeared in the early medieval period. In his book
Libraries: An Unquiet History, Matthew Battles calls such disasters
“biblioclasms.”
The most commonly invoked image of biblioclasm is
the burning of the Library of Alexandria, probably the greatest-ever collection
of Hellenic manuscripts, many of which are now lost to history. In most
versions of the story, the arson was committed by early Christian zealots or by
invading Arabs under the banner of Islam. Indeed, either group might have seen
the burning of the pagan Library as an act of devotion and a net gain for
civilization. Just as likely, however, the fire is a myth that obscures a long,
slow decline, and the flames that brought down the ancient library were fed not
by a single man or group, but by the winds of history—changing reading habits,
political instability, and the decline of the administrative state.
Will the digital age mark another era of decline
for libraries?
